


Forma

by SpiralSpace



Series: Rok's Duty [1]
Category: Warframe
Genre: Anxiety, Gen, Rok isn't an OC guys I just gave him a name its toooootally different, Unsolicited Life Advice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-07
Updated: 2017-12-07
Packaged: 2019-02-11 16:16:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12938982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpiralSpace/pseuds/SpiralSpace
Summary: Despite what one might be led to believe, a lot of people in the Origin system are not space ninjas. Some of them probably even have real jobs.





	Forma

Enforcement Leader Rok wondered if this could possibly be his last inspection. Probably nobody would care if it was; like most grineer he never saw his own aptitude results, but his bunkmates back in boot insisted that nobody important ever got assigned these jobs. If you were too incompetent for the warzones but too loyal to mulch, that was how you ended up working customs on some backwater solar rail. So they said, anyway.

Earth Five was his rail, specifically. And it was his, in an almost nontrivial sense. Rail control had jurisdiction over ship itineraries, engineering issues and the drone fleet that handled naval security, but he was still the ranking marine officer, which meant that if anything happened onboard any of the variety of vessels making the jump from the Cetus dockyards to the Earth colonies, you could bet it would be his head to roll for it.

Thus, inspections. He’d boarded the vessel expecting to find that inside matched outside; a ramshackle, bolted-together death trap of a freighter, just waiting for the opportunity to have a hull breach or a drive malfunction mid jump and make the career switch to coffin. Ships like that were a common enough encounter lately. The way things stood most merchants operating outside of the Corpus monopolies were basically gamblers, pushing their luck and their last credits on the hope of some big windfall. But the inside of this ship was something else entirely, enough to make Rok suspect the rough ferroplated exterior was a deliberate disguise. The systems he saw weren’t Corpus, weren’t Grineer, weren’t salvage. And if they weren’t one of those three, then the ship must be very old indeed. It seemed to be in good repair. Cozy even. He’d glanced down at the manifest in case it had a make and model, but it only gave the ship’s name, the Terpsichore.

Which had been suspicious enough, but then he’d entered the cargo bay, flanked on either side by two of his troopers. Only to be greeted by a child. “Dah-dap, officer!” she said, waving enthusiastically at him. Reflexively, he checked the corners of the room, partially for security, but mostly in the hope of locating a responsible adult to talk to. That hope (a rather reasonable one, he thought to himself!) had been immediately dashed, when she’d continued. “Captain Nakak, at your service!” And then she’d done a ridiculous twirl, and just looked up at him, as if he probably met twelve year olds sailing the rails alone every day in his line of work.

Rok recalled a tale he’d heard when he first started working this rail, from an ancient lancer. It had been hard to understand the old grunt, he must have been forty Terran cycles old if he was a day, but he remembered the broad strokes of the legend. The ancient Orokin masters, the lancer had said, once created monsters that disguised themselves as children, to prey on the compassion of the liberators, and stop them from freeing the grineer. Rok wondered silently if the story was true; there was a good chance it was just something somebody made up to explain their own petty fear. Regular children were already unnerving enough to most grineer. Neither he nor his millions of brethren had ever been a child, at least not in the strictest sense, born as they were, fully formed at two metres and change tall. And he’d heard quite unsettling rumours about the things their teeth did…

Regardless. There were a thousand minor reasons to suspect something was very wrong with this search, which had led Rok to wonder about his prospective lifespan.

“Are you running this ship, uh, all by yourself?” he asked.

“She pretty much runs herself, really,” Nakak replied, chipper. “But yes, no passengers on this haul.”

“Is this your entire cargo?” he inquired, trying to focus on just getting the inspection done.

“The really choice stuff’s on the second deck.” Nakak gestured him towards the heavy bulkhead which blocked off the lower level, and began trying to pull it open, struggling comically. By the time he reached it, she had managed it, however.

This revealed a narrow iron stair. He motioned for his troopers to stay above and do a sweep of the upper hold; there was barely room for one on the staircase, let alone a quintet of the Grineer empire’s finest bumbling rejects. Staring down at the inky depths of the lower hold, he took a deep breath and stepped onto the ladder, a bit after Nakak. Or Captain Nakak, properly. If he –was- going to end up another tall tale, he figured he might as well get it over with.  
-  
“Pretty empty down here right now though,” Nakak commented, as she dropped down onto the floor.

But just as his boot touched the final rung, Rok’s proximity scanner went off. “New signature at seven. Unidentified type,” it reported, robot-calm.

In a fraction of a second Rok had let go of the ladder, landed, pivoted one eighty and brought his Hind rifle to bear on the target, which turned out to be an unmarked crate.

“Wh- what’s that!” he demanded, his voice fraying a bit at the edges.

“That, my friend,” Nakak replied, pride clear in her voice, “is forma.”

Rok was surprised by her tone. He tried to unclench a bit, letting his rifle fall to his side but not reholstering it. He’d never heard of a forma, but it must be some kind of animal. “Do you have a passage visa for this, ehhhh, forma?”

“I don’t, but it isn’t alive. Or at least, it’s no more alive than any other piece of Orokin technology. Not surprised it got your sensor a bit befuddled though! The really ancient stuff tends to do that. Either way, there should be a note about that in the manifest, no? Next to the necessary signatures for moving antiquities, of course.”

His palms sweaty, he pawed through his papers. There was indeed a note about handling of active Orokin technology, and credentials for permission and expedition of shipment signed by General Sargas Ruk himself. 

They came back as valid when he ran them through the scanner. If this was a package for the general, well, that explained a lot. General Ruk had full authority over all of the empire’s archaeological projects, and he was known to work with anyone who could get him working Orokin devices. Excluding the Tenno, of course, but apparently including juvenile freighter captains. Mystery solved, then. Maybe he could convince Rail Control to chew out the officer over at Cetus Five who didn’t bother to give him a heads up on it.

“Uh huh, very well. F’r the Queens,” he said, in a perfunctory manner, his gun finally returning to its mag strip. The enforcement leader turned to leave.

“Wait,” Nakak said. He stopped. “Is everything alright?” she asked, concerned. “You seem tense.”

“You ask all of your customs officers about their day?”

“Well, no. You seem a bit chattier than some of the Grineer I’ve met. I suppose it would be polite to ask more often though,” she mused.

Rok sighed in resignation. He was indeed more… eloquent, compared to many of his frontline peers. He’d never really seen it as a virtue. Talking jobs didn’t require strength, or courage, or loyalty or anything else that might suggest they required a Grineer super soldier’s touch. The grineer would usually just scare some locals into doing that kind of work for them anyway. Probably it just another reason he’d been shipped here, to the ass end of the solar system. He glanced up at the open bulkhead above them, to make sure his troopers were out of earshot. “There’s always something to be tense about. But you’ve been watching the broadcasts, right? It’s act of terror this and heightened vigilance that. I’ve been dealing with double the workload just corralling all the extra men they’ve sent my way. High command’s increased every rail security deployment by one hundred percent! It’s supposed to ‘avoid further embarrasments’ and ‘tighten the net’ on those tenno skum.” He rubbed his face with a gloved hand. Nakak listened, conciliatorily. “But I dunno how much it’s gonna help. I mean rap-ih-took, you’ve heard the stories? That they fight with swords because they can’t be killed? What are a few more men going to do? All I know is, any enforcement team that’s actually found one has suffered heavy casualties, and none of them brought back enough bits to collect on that big bounty Councilor Hek put up, so what does that say about our chances?” He glanced around the room. “I’m just wondering how long it’ll be until one does me in.”

“Well, friend, I don’t think you should worry so much,” Nakak smiled.

“Oh, I should just relax, should I?” Rok shot back, irritated.

Nakak leaned against the wall of the hold. “Have you ever been downwell?” she asked.

“Well, uh, never on Earth, but I was on Mars a bit. Way after the pacification, just cleanup stuff.”

“If the beasts of Mars are anything like the beasts of Earth, then they have much to teach us. They live their lives in the open every moment, just waiting for some other creature to swoop in and make them a meal. And yet, most of them sleep quite soundly at night. Do you know how?”

He shrugged.

“They only think of the now, their present moment. We cannot change the future, most times. If a tenno does show up someday, how will the worrying you did today help? When that is your present, then it might help, but until then? Waste of time. Focus on your situation. You’ll be better off for it.”

Ruk sighed. That was actually good advice. He’d find a tenno or he wouldn’t, that was pretty much totally beyond his control. But how he would react was. And for the last lunar cycle he’d been a jittery mess. Stability was surely a better strength then vigilance, even if it was harder to achieve. “Heh. Tell that to my boss,” he chuckled, stepping onto the ladder. Looking up to the patch of light above, he already felt cheerier than he'd been in quite a while.

Nakak returned his small smile, ear to ear. “May our paths cross again some time, friend!” she yelled after him, doing a little jig. “And make sure to see Earth, if you have the chance!”

What a strange child, Enforcement Leader Rok thought.

**Author's Note:**

> "I’ve worked all kinds of jobs in all kinds of places. Never met a good person, or a bad one. It’s just folks, friend. Just folks."
> 
> "..."
> 
> "Still, we're lucky he didn't find the snipetrons, eh tenno?"


End file.
